You humble me.  You come into my office week after week and you let your most vulnerable self be seen by me.  But this last week you unsettled me.  Looking inside yourself, you plucked out the most undesirable part of you and compared it to the most desirable part of me.  And then, I literally felt a dark shadow enter the room and I saw your shame mirrored in the expression on your face.

As I left my office afterwards, I still felt humbled.  But I also felt a deep sadness that you compared yourself to me and saw yourself as lacking.  And I wanted to counteract the shame by sharing mine.  I wanted to tell you all the ways in which I have lived with my own regrets.  I wanted to tell you about the times I continued in behavior over and over and over even though I knew it was wrong for me.  I wanted to tell you all my shameful behavior, my addictions that still sit silently within me, waiting for recovery to slip away.  I wanted to tell you all the ways in which I have hurt others, especially those I love the most.  I wanted to share all the times my faith in God grew dim and I wondered where he was in all the pain I was suffering.  But sharing that with you would have only eased your shame slightly.  

This process cannot be about you comparing yourself to me and finding us equals, even though we always have been.  It calls on each of us to look outside and see that every human being on this planet has a trail of regrets, emotional pain, and moments where faith has left our periphery.  Ron Potter-Efron called this accepting that we are flawed people in a flawed world.

When we do that, we see that our sense of global defectiveness is not about us, but about what it means to be human.  

When we can embrace this sense of shared humanity, we can accept our past, instead of fighting against something we have no power to change.  

When we let go of that struggle and lean into acceptance, we can get curious about how we want today to look.

I love you.  I love what we share together in the quiet intimacy of my office.  I often wish you could see yourself through my eyes instead of the distorted filter of shame.  But today, I am going to just sit with the wonder of our time together, bask in the humility of sharing your path, and wish you peace in this amazing journey we call life.